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THE UNSEEN REVOLUTION by Peter F. Drucker

THE UNSEEN REVOLUTION

How Pension Fund Socialism Came To America

by Peter F. Drucker

Pub Date: June 16th, 1976
ISBN: 043490399X
Publisher: Harper & Row

According to Peter Drucker, the last quarter century has witnessed an unrecorded economic gyration toward nothing short of a unique and salutary American brand of socialism—the ultimate ownership of the nation's business by the nation's workers, as beneficiaries of pension trusts. The over-65 savant of management-cum-economic theory takes on a subject for which he is distinctly suited, and for the first time a cogent analysis of the probable impact of the American pension system is constructed for the generalist. The Dickensian clerk, the assembly-line worker, you, I, and the rest of the proletariat have become men and women, not of property, but of expectations. The employees of the country are becoming the new owners (if not the managers) of our major productive resources and the consequences, as well as the fact, ought to be examined. Horrible examples of pension fund mismangement and misinformation abound. New York City's unfunded pension debt, approaching $10 billion, stalks the Big Apple like the ghost of King Kong. The newly promoted employee stock ownership plan, the Kelso plan—whereby a struggling firm may sell its own stock to the pension trust established for the benefit of its workers—is treated with scorn. (On the other hand the Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association, serving the author's academic community, is presented as the most ingenious and intelligent of pension funds.) Drucker dismisses the often cited excessive concentration of power in massive pension trusts as a "pure red herring." He's after bigger philosophical fish. Among them is the significance of an ever increasing cadre of pensioners, members of a welfare society not (as citizens) of a welfare state. Discussion of the subject is timely and though the book is filled with polemic, it may be the spark that ignites debate.